[4] Two months later in April, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear RKO's appeal, leaving the firm with no further recourse but to accept the Commission's decision and surrender WNAC-TV's license.

[9] NETV's mission from the start was to allocate programming hours to innovative, in-house productions, in much the same way that Boston Broadcasters did when it launched WCVB-TV on channel 5 ten years earlier.

Notable productions that premiered early on were Look (1982–1984), which began as a two-hour (4 p.m. to 6 p.m.) late afternoon talk and lifestyle show that led into WNEV's 6 p.m. newscast.

Despite a powerful effort at an entertaining and informative program, and praise from critics, Look was a ratings failure; for its second year, the show was cut back to an hour and renamed New England Afternoon before being dropped.

In January 1990, Mugar announced that on March 12 of that year, WNEV would change its call letters to WHDH-TV, in order to correspond with its sister radio operation.

NETV gradually slid into a deficit, prompting cutbacks on in-house programming as well as in the television station's news department; the most notable effect being the elimination of WHDH-TV's 5 p.m. newscast for two years beginning in 1991.

[14][15] On April 22, 1993, David Mugar entered into an agreement to sell WHDH to Miami-based Sunbeam Television, a company led by Worcester native Edmund Ansin.

Cheatwood had become infamous in Miami for his changes to WSVN's news operation, which focused on visually intensive, fast-paced newscasts with heavy emphasis on tabloid journalism, particularly covering crime (WSVN—which was an NBC affiliate from its 1956 sign-on until it joined Fox in 1989—adopted the format developed by Cheatwood in order to buoy viewership for its newscasts, which like WHDH, had languished in third place for several years).

[27][28][29] WHDH began removing all references to the proposed 10 p.m. newscast from its website the next day,[29] and on April 13, 2009, the station announced that it had decided to comply and air The Jay Leno Show instead.

[30] The fears of possible ratings issues with the prime time talk show as the lead-in for its late newscast would become well-realized, as viewership for WHDH's 11 p.m. news plunged to third place (a 20% drop from the previous year) during the November 2009 sweeps period.

[36] Following the report, Paul Magnes, WHDH's vice president and general manager, told the Boston Herald that the station still expected the NBC affiliation to be renewed.

[38] Ansin believed that NBCUniversal's main motivation for these moves were to create further synergies with WNEU and New England Cable News for the purposes of advertising sales.

[39] Initial reports suggested that if WHDH were to lose NBC programming, Sunbeam would move the CW affiliation currently held by WLVI to channel 7.

Sunbeam also asserted that moving NBC to a company-owned station would "[enable] Comcast to increase its monopoly power in the Boston television market, and the resulting decrease in competition will harm consumers, advertisers and other broadcasters.

[51][52] However, station lawyer Michael Gass told the Boston Business Journal that channel 7 was still pursuing the appeal, saying that "[t]hey have to prepare to be a non-affiliate and have a plan for doing that even though we continue to believe that Comcast did not honor its obligations to us," while conceding that it was unlikely that a court would force NBC to remain on WHDH.

This agreement ended in 2018 when NBC purchased Nashua, New Hampshire-licensed WYCN-CD (now WBTS-CD), to channel share with full-power PBS member station WGBX-TV, which transmits from Needham.

Motivated to cultivate an identity to the station that would indirectly help its last-place news ratings, WNEV acquired the lottery from WBZ-TV, which had announced late in 1986 that it would no longer show the games.

In the spring of 1984, NETV moved its on-air news look away from the changes made only two years prior, taking away the anchoring desk from the newsroom and utilizing a backdrop allowing chroma keys and CGI graphics to be placed.

Despite a continued massive influx of capital and marketing (including a highly financed promotional campaign employing the refrain "Feel Good About That"), and more positive reviews of the station's newscasts following the appointment of Willis as lead anchor, WNEV still failed to take the competition by storm.

They planned to keep Ellis and Willis on at 6 p.m., while giving the 11 p.m. slot to weekend anchor/reporter Kate Sullivan and Dave Wright, an incoming newsman hired away from ATV in the Canadian Maritimes.

Yanoff and Rosser attempted to come to agreeable terms with Ellis, with two proposed plans—to either pair him with Kate Sullivan or Dave Wright, or to find him another replacement female anchor.

Wright, who had created the Live at Five format at ATV (where he had hosted it from 1982 to 1986), brought the concept to WNEV, which had him and Williams walking around a special newsroom set sans an anchor desk as they presented stories.

Just prior to Wright's departure, Jeff Rosser had left the station at the close of his contract, and arriving in his place was former WCVB news director Jim Thistle.

By September 1988, the Live at Five format was dropped (as it remained the intellectual property of ATV), and the 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. block was restructured as a more conventional newscast, anchored by Williams and Lester Strong.

Only two months into her promotion to lead anchor, Ellis declared herself a free agent, quickly accepting an offer at NBC News as a national correspondent.

Cheatwood soon hired Kim Carrigan, a transplant from Des Moines, Iowa, who first appeared as female lead anchor alongside Sahl in April 1994.

Later in January, as a result of a package deal WHDH had signed the previous fall, the station saw the arrival of husband-and-wife anchors John Marler and Cathy Marshall.

Gerry Grant departed from the morning newscast in February 1995 to join the reporting staff of Entertainment Tonight; he was replaced that April by Alison Gilman.

On December 19, 2006, WHDH took over production of WLVI's nightly 10 p.m. newscast (after Sunbeam's purchase of the station resulted in the shutdown of channel 56's in-house news department).

The equipment for the channel 7 digital transmitter was shipped to Miami for use by sister station WSVN, which continues to broadcast on VHF 7 with few complaints due to South Florida's less-varied terrain.